Serious concerns are being raised about the stability of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud computing provider, after another major outage disrupted operations for retailers, financial institutions, and popular apps across the globe — including in Australia.

The failure, which also took down WhatsApp and Amazon’s Alexa, left thousands of websites and online services inaccessible for hours. Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, Fortnite, Hulu, Venmo, Coinbase, and Microsoft 365 were among those hit, while Amazon’s own Ring security network experienced outages lasting up to nine hours in some regions.

Banks, retailers, and gaming platforms all reported problems before Amazon engineers began restoring services. According to AWS’s service status page, “elevated error rates” continued to affect several systems well into the recovery phase.

Hours after saying that it had mostly recovered from the database network issue, AWS said some users were still struggling to connect with their AWS servers.

In an update on its health dashboard, the company said multiple AWS services had experienced network connectivity issues.

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The outage also impacted government and business operations internationally — with the UK government’s official website and online tax portal going offline, and McDonald’s ordering systems disrupted in several markets. The Financial Times reported that AI search engine Perplexity, the London Stock Exchange Group, and Lloyds Bank were among those affected.

Amazon attributed the crash to an “operational issue” that spread across multiple AWS services.

As platforms went dark, social media erupted with a wave of tongue-in-cheek “end of the internet” memes.

Viral posts on X and Reddit featured images of Homer Simpson warning “The end is near” and the well-known “This is fine” dog surrounded by flames.

While most systems were restored after several hours, the backlash was swift.

Many users claimed that the incident was the largest internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction, which crippled businesses, medical facilities, and government services across Australia.

AWS underpins around 30 per cent of the world’s cloud computing market and serves as the backbone for many of the globe’s largest apps, companies, and government services — a dominance that’s now drawing renewed scrutiny over the resilience of the global cloud infrastructure.

Australia’s growing reliance on Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been underscored following a major outage that disrupted global systems overnight and retailers in multiple Countries.Amazon data centre

In January 2025, the federal government signed a three-year, whole-of-government agreement with AWS, giving federal, state, and local agencies streamlined access to the US cloud giant’s services. Once dependent on local servers, many government departments now host critical national data on AWS infrastructure — despite concerns about redundancy and the risk of outages like the one experienced overnight.

Had the outage occurred during Australian business hours, many retailers would have been unable to process transactions.

The Albanese government has also committed $2 billion over the next decade for AWS to build a “Top Secret Cloud” — a platform designed to store Australia’s most sensitive defence and intelligence information.

More than 140 Commonwealth, state, and territory agencies already rely on AWS for essential functions across transport, health, education, and taxation.

While the root cause of this week’s disruption has not yet been confirmed, it appears linked to a DNS (Domain Name System) failure in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region in Virginia.

There is also no assurances that it won’t happen again.

It’s the third time in five years a major internet outage has been caused by an AWS failure, because of problems at their US northern Virginia data centre.

We already know the Domain Name System (DNS) is also the likely cause of the fault.

Likened to the internet’s “phone book”, the DNS can “paralyse” entire applications and services if it domain name resolution stops working, according to experts.

We have been promised a detailed rundown by AWS of what went wrong, known as a “post-event summary”, although that could take weeks or months.